Red Sparrow

“Leave your bags in the hallway and follow me,” said the woman, who had preceded them up the front steps and through the towering front doors of weathered wood. They gathered in an auditorium. Judging by the bookshelves, it had formerly been a library that had been converted to a lecture hall with a raised wooden platform and dais and several rows of creaking wooden seats at one end of the room. The woman, dressed in a shapeless black suit, walked among them and passed out envelopes by hand. “Inside you will find your room assignments,” she said, “and the names you will use during your training. Use only these names. You will not relate any personal information about yourselves to other students. Any infraction will result in immediate dismissal.” In her early fifties, the administrator had upswept gray hair, a square face, and a straight nose. She looked like the woman on the stamps, Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Her words came out in gouts of yellow.

“You have been chosen for specialized training,” said the matron. “It is a great honor. The nature of the training may seem alien and strange to some of you. Concentrate on the lessons and the exercises. Nothing else is important.” Her voice echoed in the high-ceilinged hall. “Now go upstairs and find your rooms. Dinner is at six in the dining room across the hall. Instruction will begin here this evening at seven o’clock. Go now. Dismiss.”

In the upper hallway Dominika counted twelve rooms, six either side, numbers in cracked-enamel lozenges screwed into the wood. Between the bedroom doors along the hallway were other plain doors without knobs or handles. These could be opened only by use of a key. Her room was painted light green and was spare but comfortable, with a single bed, standing closet, table, and chair. There was a faint but constant odor of disinfectant, on the bedspread, in the closet, in the stack of sheets on the shelf. The room had a curtained-off toilet (above which hung a hand shower) and a rust-stained sink. Above the writing table was a large mirror, too large, incongruous in the barracks-style room. Dominika put her cheek flat against the mirror and looked at the surface in glancing light, like in training. The silver smokiness of a two-way mirror. Welcome to Sparrow School.

Dusk, and the night sky not visible through the pine tops. The house was dimly lit; there were no clocks in the mansion, anywhere. No telephone rang. The hallways and staircases and ground-floor rooms were silent; the night invaded the house. The walls were bare, held none of the daguerreotype official portraits of Lenin or Marx, though moldy outlines where portraits once hung were still visible on the panels. What Tatar noble family had lived here before the Revolution? Did resplendent parties ride and hunt in these pines? Did they hear the whistle of the Moscow steam packet from the river? What Soviet instinct had put the school this far away from Moscow?

She looked around the dining table at the eleven other “students” silently spooning tokmach, a thick noodle soup that had been ladled into their bowls from a colossal blue-and-white porcelain tureen by a wordless waiter. A plate of boiled meat followed. The women and three of the men were all in their twenties; the fourth man seemed even younger, in his teens, thin and pale. Were any of them also SVR-trained? Dominika turned to the woman on her left and smiled. “My name is Katia,” she said, using her training alias.

The woman smiled back. “I am Anya.” She was slight and blond, with a wide mouth and high cheekbones lightly dusted by freckles. She looked like an elegant milkmaid with pale blue eyes. Her halting words were cornflower-blue, innocence and artlessness. Others shyly recited their aliases. After dinner they filed quietly into the library.

It was absolutely quiet in the room, then the lights dimmed. Welcome to Sparrow School instruction. A film started, stark black-and-white images, brutal, feral, sawtoothed, it burst onto a screen at the front of the room with straining faces, clasping bodies, organs shafting endlessly, everywhere, now in such close focus to become gynecological, unrecognizable, unworldly. The sound started at full volume and Dominika saw the heads of her classmates jerk back at the sudden assault of sound and sight. The air was filled with spinning color for her; she knew the signs of overload when the bleeding sequence red-violet-blue-green-yellow began. She had no control and closed her eyes to escape the onslaught. Then a speaker popped and the sound suddenly went down to barely audible, so that the woman on the screen seemed as if she were whispering, even as her hair stuck to the side of her face and her body was jolted endlessly by an off-screen partner.